The pending King of Ga visit to Easton raises the touchy issue of royalty

TOWN SQUARE

John Quartey, a 1998 Easton Area High School grad, now known as Nii Guate… (CONTRIBUTED PHOTO, THE…)

June 21, 2012|Paul Carpenter

There are two guaranteed ways to diminish marital bliss in a certain family.

The first is to say something rotten about my wife's beloved Democratic Party, which is tied for first place, with the Republican Party, when it comes to the most worthless serve-only-respective-special-interest establishments in the United States.

An equally short route to the domestic doghouse results from my completely reasonable views on the most worthless establishment outside America — royalty.

A week from today, the King of Ga, in the west African nation of Ghana, is expected to visit Easton, where he graduated from high school in 1998, when he was known as John Quartey. He is now 33 and goes by the title of Nii Guate Asuasa Ekasee Ako II, Ga War-Council King of Akra.

There is some controversy over whether Ako II (if that's an acceptable short version) is really a king or just a chief, or whatever, with differing versions coming from Easton Mayor Sal Panto Jr. (who is whipping up fanfare for the royal visit), Ghana's ambassador to the United States, and a relative who is a Philadelphia podiatrist.

It was Samuel Quartey, the Philly foot doctor, who said John Quartey is a chief. I am not sure why anybody cares about the semantic schism. As far as I'm concerned, Ako II has as much right to call himself a king as Elizabeth II has to call herself a queen. I'll get back to that, but the topic of royalty always causes hard jaws at home.

Even though my wife worked hard to become an American citizen (1989 in Allentown) and is as patriotic as anybody, she cannot let go of the feelings she has for the monarchy of her native Japan.

We were newlyweds there when Kotaishi-sama (Americans then called him Crown Prince Akihito) married a commoner, Michiko. At that time, Showa Tenno Heika (Americans say Emperor Hirohito, of World War II fame) was still on the throne.

By the time the crown prince acceded to the throne, we were in the Lehigh Valley. We now address him as Tenno Heika; it is unthinkable to use plebeian names. While I go along with that etiquette, my views of royalty in general are harsh.

For example. I always have opposed communists and their Bolshevik predecessors and everything they did or stood for, with one significant exception. I think their solution to the problem of the Romanov royal family in Russia was not only understandable; it was absolutely necessary and, in the case of adults, well-deserved.

Similarly, one of the few bright spots of the French Revolution was when guillotine blades dropped on the necks of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI. (As I reported in May, the French royal family had plans to escape to America and a settlement, called French Azilum, was built for them near Towanda, Pa., where I once lived.

It is a true blessing of world history that they were never able to come to this nation to infect it with their putrid presence.

I never called for the murder of the Japanese royal family, per se, but my general anti-royal views horrify my wife. I have to admit that both the present emperor and his father (who was not to blame for WW II, by the way) were accomplished marine biologists whose research actually contributed something to society, unlike almost all the other members of royal families.

Nevertheless, I detest the entire institution of royalty and the idea that otherwise useless people rule by divine right, as arranged by the chance encounter of a spermatozoon with an egg in a fallopian tube. And when it comes to the British or Arabian royal families, I sometimes entertain fantasies of a Bolshevik comeback.

Queen Elizabeth II is the world's richest monarch, according to some sources, with British taxpayers struggling to shovel enough money into her palace to give her a tally of $80 billion, for which she has never so much as lifted a bejeweled finger.

This royal family is actually a bunch of Germans, some of whom collaborated with the Nazis before and during World War II. We hanged the Nazis after the war; where were the dangling Windsors?

King Abdullah II of Saudi Arabia has $66 billion, and he presides over the world's most depraved regime, propped up by America and the lives of American GIs.

For what? So that Abdullah and the rest of his royal clan can insist that women be stoned to death for a lack of servility, or so that the royals can fill their harems and forced-labor enterprises with slaves kidnapped from other countries?

Next come some other Arab crowned heads and the king of Thailand ($40 billion), whose reign also is propped up by America, and then the Sultan of Brunei, who has 6,000 personal cars and the world's biggest palace, with 1,788 rooms.

When the Bolsheviks called such systems decadent and corrupt, they were making an understatement.

All of these irrefutable arguments have failed to faze my wife, who still gets a thrill from reading or seeing something on television about royalty — not just in Japan but even in England — and she refuses to abandon that dratted Democratic Party.

Meanwhile, the King of Ga appears to be a pleasant and harmless enough fellow, based on pictures and stories about his visit to Easton next week, and I wish him well. I just think he ought to get a regular job.